Book Review : Ralegh: A Man of Action and Also a Man of Letters

Sir Walter Ralegh: Selected Writings, edited by Gerald Hammond (Penguin: $6.95)

“Sir Walter Ralegh was a bad walker and did not know Hebrew,” Gerald Hammond explains by way of introduction to his collection of Ralegh’s poetry, historical prose and letters. Otherwise, the ill-fated Elizabethan adventurer and courtier was a Renaissance man in the literal sense: “He was a soldier, scholar, horseman . . . father of the idea of the British Empire . . . chemist and alchemist . . . patron of poets, and yet a fine enough poet himself to rival any he patronized . . . introducer of the potato to Ireland and tobacco to England . . . explorer; ship designer; naval and military strategist; quack doctor; notorious atheist, but the last great asserter of God’s providential pattern of history. . . .”

We may be tempted to see the storied figure of Sir Walter Ralegh as nearly mythic, an emblem of Elizabethan romance and ambition rather than a mere mortal. But Hammond’s collection allows us to know Ralegh intimately, to experience through Ralegh’s own words the grandiose dreams, the magnificent passions, the dark terrors that haunted him unto the axman’s block. Above all, we see that Ralegh was both a man of action and a man of letters, so fully successful in both enterprises that his accomplishments in either one would have earned him a place in history.

Fine Elizabethan Prose

“His achievement as a poet is too substantial for him not be thought a major one,” insists Hammond, a professor at the University of Manchester, and he describes Ralegh’s account of his perilous search for El Dorado in the Spanish possessions of the New World as “one of the finest pieces of Elizabethan prose.” The centerpiece of “Sir Walter Ralegh” is a lengthy excerpt from “The History of the World,” which Ralegh composed during his 13-year imprisonment in the Tower of London. “The History of the World,” writes Hammond, “deserves to be set near King Lear as one of the English Renaissance’s powerfully negative visions of the state of man on ‘this stage-play world.’ ”

Ralegh’s poetry is romantic, sentimental, very often florid, but remarkably accessible to the modern reader. As Hammond points out, Ralegh favored the epigram and the memorable image, although such memorable moments are frequently embedded in otherwise unremarkable poetry. Even before coming to “Sir Walter Ralegh,” I once copied a fragment of his poetry into my journal: “But true love is a durable fire,/In the mind ever burning,/Never sick, never old, never dead,/From itself never turning.” But the poem from which the evocative stanza comes (“As you came from the holy land”) is burdened with less sublime plaints of a spurned lover: “I have loved her all my youth,/But now old, as you see;/Love likes not the falling fruit/From the withered tree.”

Ralegh was decidedly less courtly when he described his adventures as the aspiring conqueror of El Dorado in “The Discovery of Guiana.” He ranged through the native villages and Spanish outposts of Guiana, taking hostages, setting fire to enemy encampments, seeking but never finding “El Madre deloro,” the font of wealth that would restore him to honor in the Royal Court. Even so, he was a seductive chronicler of the wealth and wonders of the New World: “Ropes, budgets, chests and troughs of gold and silver” that awaited the conqueror, “birds of all colours, some carnation, some crimson, orange, tawny, purple, green.” (Ralegh was casually brutal: “It was unto us a great good passing of the time to behold them, besides the relief we found by killing some store of them with our fowling pieces.”)

Propaganda, Self-Promotion

Ralegh’s purpose was propaganda and self-promotion: “Guiana is a Country that hath yet her Maidenhead,” Ralegh wrote in the vain hope of winning royal patronage for further adventures. “Whatsoever Prince shall possess it, that Prince shall be Lord of more gold, and of a more beautiful Empire, and of more Cities and people, than either the king of Spain or the great Turk.” In fact, Ralegh was released from the Tower in 1616 to once again search for gold in the New World, but he failed, and paid for that failure with his life.

Dishonor and impending death are the subtext of Ralegh’s final opus, “The History of the World.” He discoursed on the sweep of history as it was then conceived, moving casually from the Bible, through the accounts of Greece and Rome and into his own era; at one point in the narrative, he paused to compare the contemporary English soldier with those of Alexander and Caesar, and resolved that “neither the Macedonian nor the Roman soldier was of equal value of the English.” Thus Nebuchadnezzar, Xerxes and Hannibal figure even more prominently than the kings and generals of more recent memory, and ancient history is rendered as a metaphor for what Ralegh perceived as the wrongs worked against him.

As Ralegh wrote in his cell in the Tower of London, imprisoned on charges of treason brought by Elizabeth’s successors, he did not bother to conceal his motives nor his mission--to proclaim his innocence and to bemoan the infidelity of the sovereigns he had served: “Oh by what plots, by what forswearings, betrayings, oppressions, imprisonments, tortures, poisonings, and under what reasons of State, and politic subtlety, have these forenamed Kings, both strangers and of our own Nation, pulled the vengeance of God upon themselves!” Ralegh wrote. “For who hath not observed what labour, practice, peril, bloodshed, and cruelty, the Kings and Princes of the world have undergone, exercised, taken on them, and committed; to make themselves and their issues masters of the world?”